Annuity Marketing Through Gender Separation

These are really interesting when you break them down. The differences between how men and women look at life. Here are some thoughts.

REMOTE CONTROL. Female.... A device for changing from one TV channel to another. Male... A device for scanning through all 375 channels every 5 minutes.

COMMUNICATION

Female... The open sharing of thoughts and feelings with one's partner. Male... Leaving a note before going drinking with the guys.

Gender selling, is there a different approach? Here are my experiences: Selling annuities can also be separated based on the gender of your prospect. If you are selling to a single female (senior) safety and security is at the top of the list and trying to sell indexed annuities is not a good idea.

Single men are much the same way, generally safety and security is important and I have found that single men are always interested in how much of a monthly income they receive at some future point in time. Single females don?t seem to have this concern.

Now put them together and a whole new chemistry is developed. The male always wants to know how much can they make and to the female it is less important. In a married couples situation an indexed annuity almost always will win and it may have something to do with the hunter/gatherer/nest builder syndrome.

I am not being sexist here, but based on my experiences, men are hunter gatherers and women are nest builders. A nest builder goes through three stages, build the nest (early family), keep the nest tidy (family years) and clean out the nest (later in life).

So it is important to sell to the situation, married couples will almost always have an interest in indexed annuities because of the thoughts and needs of the male. Focus on upswing and yield as a benefit.

? Single females will almost always want safety and security and would not be a good target for an indexed annuity. Focus on safety and security.
? Single males will always have an interest in future income so focus on the benefit of annuitization.
? Married couples will almost always have more interest in how the money can grow. This can always be accessed by who is talking the most. If the husband talks the most then it is an indexed annuity sale. If it is the wife talking the most, then safety and security is the benefit to focus on.

By separating sales concepts via gender separation will in fact provide you an edge in selling annuities. Whatever you do always focus on the benefits an annuity can provide and how those benefits can be of use to your prospects.

Bill Broich is a 30 year annuity salesman who helps agents generate annuity leads. Visit his website to learn more - Annuity marketing

 

Annuity Leads

It is a challenging job to generate your own annuity leads. If each of its steps is not done properly, you will be throwing your cash in the garbage. It is not very easy to find good annuity leads.

After retirement, most people invest their financial retirement benefits in insurance firms, on the provision that their money is repaid to them on a regular basis. More clearly, the investors buy annuity (the above agreement) from the insurers. With this arrangement, the investors are assured of a regular income through retirement, or thereafter to their successors.

But in some situations such as buying a home, the annuity payments that the investors receive may not be sufficient. At such times, the investors can withdraw a prescribed amount by paying a surcharge to the insurance company. But, this is often found to be uneconomical. To overcome this difficulty, the US government introduced certain provisions by which the retired person can sell his annuity to an approved financial institute that pays a lump sum amount to the person.

Selling of these annuities involves several steps. At first, the retiree goes to a finance organization, fills out a 'request form' called 'annuity lead', and submits the form to the organization. Many people seek the assistance of a broker or an annuity lead provider to generate the annuity leads. It is important to make sure that lead providing company, the broker, and financing institute are certified.

Annuity leads are considered as the most important documents in a money transfer. They contain information such as date of request, private information (like name, address, city, phone and email address), initial investment, source of funds, payment timeframe (usually in number of years), and rate of return. The leads also include the lead reference number, and the date and time of lead generation.

There are some basic precautions to follow while considering annuity lead services. First, a company should never purchase more than they can well afford. It is also important to check whether the lead service is guaranteed or not.

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The Terrible Truth about Insurance and Annuity Leads

You see the websites, you see the ads: exclusive, never before sold, prospects eager to buy, insurance and annuity leads. Some leads cost a few dollars - others are over one-hundred a pop.

I was curious, just how good are these insurance and annuity leads? I decided to find out.

Im not going to name specific insurance and annuity lead websites, but I will give you a summary of how it all shook out.

Insurance and Annuity Lead Website A:

Cost: Cheap

Results: Terrible. 10% of the leads my staff called got number no longer in service recordings. The rest: the people had no idea what we were talking about. They were not interested in annuities, insurance or investments, nor did they remember filling out a request for information form on the internet.

Sales: 0

Insurance and Annuity Lead Website B:

Cost: Average

Results: Terrible. Prospects didnt recall filling out request for information on anything related to annuities, insurance or financial planning. Most just hung-up.

Sales: 0

Insurance and Annuity Leads Website C:

Cost: Expensive

Results: About twenty percent remembered filling out a request for info. However, they had been called numerous times by different agents. Most were getting sick and tired of the calls. A few had begun working with other agents. Most hung-up angrily.

Sales: 0


I spent two-thousand dollars on this experiment. I did not find one-receptive buyer. I had thrown away my money, not to mention time spent by my phoning staff to contact these hot prospects.

What the heck was going on? How could these websites sell such garbage?

I poked around, wrote a few e-mails to industry experts, not surprisingly, nobody got back to me. Luckily, I did end up making contact with a marketing person who had previously worked for a big lead selling outfit. She gave me the juicy details of how the majority of these lead companies operate, whether it is insurance leads, long-term care leads, annuity leads, or MLM/Work-from-Home leads. They all employ the same methods.

Method 1: You send cute E-card to your mother wishing her a happy birthday. You fill out name, e-mail and click send. Your name and e-mail are captured. If the site is a lead harvester masquerading as an e-card site, you will now be e-mailed by people looking to sell you annuities, business opportunity offers, etc.

Method 2: Leads site buys huge database, often just regional phone book listings. They sell these leads, which are nothing more than names and numbers picked from the phonebook. Some of these people may even be on the Do Not Call list, which could land you in hot water.

Method 3: Harvesting leads from search engines. Often these leads are quality, but are expensive to capture, so the leads companies will sell the leads over and over. By the time you buy the lead, it could have been sold twenty times. Sometimes youre the first to buy and you will find some quality prospects, more often youre not.

Method 4: Internet robots crawl web sites hunting for e-mail addresses associated with insurance and annuity content. Somebody might be inquiring about annuities on a newsgroup or forum, next thing they know theyre getting offers from annuity companies. The Annuity Lead companies dont let you in on how theyve harvested the leads. Its called spam and you could get in serious trouble for contacting these people unsolicited.

My contact did say there are decent leads sites. She said to check their policy to see if they guarantee the leads. Keep in mind, just because they have a guarantee doesnt mean youll get your money back if the leads fail to produce results. But often sites with some kind of guarantee are sites that harvest only quality leads and only sell them once.

If youre still of the mind to try internet leads my advice is to try just a few. Dont buy into a huge program that requires a minimum monthly or a large upfront purchase. Experiment a little with a cross-section of sites. Who knows, you may find one thats legit thatll help you make some money.

Bill Broich is the founder of The Broich Approach, an annuity selling and marketing system based in Olympia, Washington. You can find more information about him and his system at: http://www.broichapproach.com